News and commentary on Religion, especially Southern religion.

Friday, October 30, 2009

Christian culture's stigmatization of depression

German artist Albrecht Durer's engraving "Melancholia" (1514)

German artist Albrecht Durer's engraving "Melancholia" (1514)"

About Hictory Baptist pastor David Treadway's suicide, Greg Warner writes for Religion News Service:

[A professor of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Matthew] Stanford, who studies how the Christian community deals with mental illness, said depression in Christian culture carries "a double stigmatization."
Society still places a stigma on mental illness, but Christians make it worse, he said, by "over-spiritualizing" depression and other disorders — dismissing them as a lack of faith or a sign of weakness.
Polite Southern culture adds its own taboo against "talking about something as personal as your mental health," noted Scoggin.

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